LXI

IT IS AS I SKULK the loneliness of Duat’s darkest corners that I finally, truly grasp how much more this place is prison than refuge. Though I never meshed with Ahmose in the way easy friends do—I often found him to be gloomy, irritable, humourless—he was my friend, and I trusted him. Trusted his insights. I saw this city, for the most part, reflected in his eyes. And now I realise that even having had Ka’s lies exposed so plainly to him, he never quite viewed his home as anything less.

There are three accessible exits to the outside world: two in Neter-khertet and one in the east, highly visible ramps carved into the outer walls that climb to distant, equally visible obsidian archways. Guarded by Overseers and used exclusively by iunctii departing to work the mines, or hauling carts of refuse to be disposed of in pits dug into the baking sands. I watch each one for more than a day. Conceal myself on a rooftop for the first. Find a house with an overlooking window for the second, after ascertaining its residing iunctus works as a servant in the east. For the third, the eastern one and by far the most exposed option, I have to risk milling around the nearby streets with false purpose in my step. My hands shake with tension at every pass. Without Ahmose, there is no way to distract an Overseer wanting to check my face. No way to get close enough for physical contact before they realise who I am.

I am not stopped, not noticed. But in the end, I learn little more than I already know. Each entrance has an antechamber between Duat and the outside world that is only ever open on one side or the other, presumably to prevent contaminated air from rushing inside. The iunctii who are sent out are generally healthy-looking, built for labour. Few who leave return the same day. Those who do come back into the city drag carts filled with what look like raw metals or stone. Their skin is red and they move with the slow effort of those in constant pain.

There are never fewer than a half dozen eyes fixed on those coming and going. Worse, I can’t even see the mechanism for opening and shutting the antechamber doors. I don’t think it’s being operated by either workers or guards. Not directly, anyway.

I’m not getting out through there.

For almost a day after coming to the realisation, I seriously consider the Gleaner’s entrance again. I know the way back there, can get past the mutalis gate to it without any trouble. And the Gleaners have those rooms where they seem to… rest. If I can just reach one of them, I could get it to simply fly me out.

But it’s not practical. Far too great a risk. Those tunnels are narrow and long and could have a Gleaner walk into one at any time. All it would take is a glimpse.

Which leaves the river.

It’s loomed as an option since my escape from Ka’s temple, even if it is the most unpleasant one imaginable. I can’t just swim out via the Infernis—I’ve seen the columns Caeror mentioned that guard the river’s exit from Duat, and they do look exactly like the Seawall at Solivagus—but the overflow area beneath remains an option. Those pipes were large enough to allow a person through. Just. And according to Netiqret, they don’t merge back into the river until the other side of the city’s walls.

There are two main issues. The first is that the straps fastening my Vitaeria won’t resist the poison of the Infernis, so I need a way to keep them touching me that doesn’t risk my losing them mid-swim. I could try swallowing them—they’re probably small enough—but there’s also a chance they lodge and cause an internal problem that I have no way to fix.

The second is that, aside from the inevitable pain, it’s still not without significant danger. The pressure of the acidic water flowing through those narrow pipes is immense. Crushing. If there is a choke point, a sieve, anywhere narrow enough that I can’t slip through, I won’t be able to get out. Just as surely as if I swam over the Seawall above, I’d face being trapped drowning in the caustic poison for… I don’t know how long. Hours? Days? Gods, maybe until I die of old age.

I make very, very sure the other exits are untenable before I really consider it.

The night after making the decision, I start to experiment. A secluded spot, hidden from the bridge and streets on both sides. I submerge my legs for ten seconds, skin tingling and then itching and then burning until I can take it no more. I emerge and scramble out and scrub off anxiously. My flesh remains unblemished.

So I try again. And again. A little longer, each time.

The next day, I make three cuts on my arm and—hissing between gritted teeth—pry open the wounds with my knife and jam the razor-thin Vitaeria beneath my skin. As soon as the blade slides out again, the flesh pulls taut. Not restored, but sealed over. The discs form uncomfortable, visible lumps along my arm, but they are never in danger of falling out again.

That night at the river, I start submersing myself.

A minute. Then three. Then five. My skin is on fire and my chest feels like it’s bursting and I know I should be swimming desperately for the surface, but I hold myself still. Waiting for my vision to blur, my mind to start wandering, for that unnatural calm to start hitting me. But the Vitaeria buried in my arm do their work. Body and mind screaming at me to let it end, but I don’t need to breathe. It’s exactly as Caeror said, what feels like a lifetime ago.

The next day I make it ten minutes under. The next, fifteen. Perhaps it will be different when I am buffeted with the unrelenting pressure of the poisoned water as well, but there’s no good way to test that.

By the end of another week, I know I don’t have enough excuses left to avoid what I need to do.

I STAND AT THE TOP of the stairs that lead down to the massive underground cavern, tracing the luminous green water as it pours from the darkness above and thunders along the canal into the distance. All is motionless otherwise. The mists seem thick today, even more cloying and sharp in my lungs. They’re not the reason I pause, though. They’re not why I cannot bring myself to descend just yet.

The last time I felt so much dread in the doing of something, I ran the Labyrinth and ended up here.

Finally, I move. Pick my way along the overflow, across the small bridges and to the very end, where the twisted wreckage of rusting machinery protrudes from beneath impossibly large chunks of shattered stone. I gaze into the void into which the torrent of water disappears. A few feet wide but the water gushes freely into it. It must not narrow significantly, farther in, at least.

I stare at the water for a while. My thoughts on a different track, now. The acrid stench, the violent green of the water, is nothing like that night at Suus.

I still hear my sister’s voice.

“I don’t want to.” Barely audible. The protest of a child who knows they don’t have a choice. “I’m scared.”

“I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t sure.” Lie. “We can make it.” Lie. “Do you trust me?”

The last things I ever say to her.

I sit. Lost in the memory. Stare at the darkness for several minutes. The pain of losing my family and my home has become an old ache, rather than the open sore it once was. Grief never really leaves you, but at some point it becomes remembered rather than enveloping. My return to Suus, and time, has healed that wound as much as it ever will.

I dragged her onto that beach. Hair splayed, ghostlike, until she was out of the water. Eyes open and chest still. I tried to breathe life back into her, just as I’d been taught. Waves crashed and hissed and slithered back and forth along sand, flecks of dying foam in their wake as they touched us and retreated. I tried for five minutes. Ten. Crying. I stood to leave and then dropped to my knees and began again, not convinced she was gone. I didn’t know what else to do.

My throat tightens. She would have been sixteen, now.

“Don’t do this, Siamun.”

Netiqret’s voice echoes over the water from my right. My shoulders stiffen and I turn. She’s a hundred feet away. Alone.

“I have to.”

“There’s nothing for you out there.” She’s walking toward me, but slowly. Hands out, palms down. As if calming a startled animal. She’s figured out what I’m planning, if not why. “Stay.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Kiya said you fought an Overseer. Killed it in the Infernis.” She glances up into the darkness, as if she can see the spot where it happened. “The Nomarch saw your Vitaeria. It’s been watching the river. But I knew you’d think of this. And I’ve been down here a lot myself, this past week,” she finishes wryly, coming to a stop. A cautious fifty feet away. Not wanting to spook me.

“Ahmose is dead.”

“I know. I heard.” Something approaching regret in the acknowledgement. “He made the decision.”

“He had it made for him.”

She nods. A melancholy motion. “All of us wake up one morning for the last time, Siamun.”

Silence, as we remember Ahmose. Then Netiqret exhales. “Kiya is my daughter.”

Only the rushing of water for a few seconds. I suspected it, I suppose. It was the only thing that made sense. “You can’t save her, Netiqret.” Not the compassionate response, but she needs to hear it. “How long?”

“Twenty years.”

Vek. “You have to realise that what you want isn’t possible.”

She nods again. So slowly that it looks as though it physically hurts her to do so. “You know, Siamun. I thought you were sent to me for a reason. One last gift so that I could finally complete my task and get her back. I was so sure.” She gives a soft laugh. Bitter and regretful. “But now I realise yours was the task, and I was the gift. So stay. Stay and I swear to you I will help, because I need to know why.”

She takes another step forward. Another. She might be telling the truth. But she also might just be intent on protecting her newfound anonymity, making sure I can still show myself to the Nomarch every month. “No closer, Netiqret.” I stand in the water. Knee-deep. The toxins tear at my flesh.

“Alright.” She stops.

I close my eyes. Even after everything, I can still use her help, if she’s genuinely willing. I wade deeper. “Meet me here when I come back.”

“How will I know when that is?”

I give her a grim smile. Clenching my teeth against the hot pain that slices across every inch of skin from my stomach down. “You’ll rotting know.”

I twist. Grab the upper edge of the opening, and before she can respond, before I can change my mind, propel myself into the thundering, burning darkness.

MY SKIN IS ON FIRE. it feels like it’s sluicing away, layer by stinging layer, and thanks to the awful, murky muck through which I’m travelling, I can’t see to check that it’s not. My body hits the side of the pipe and I suck in an involuntary mouthful of the liquid, my innards screaming the new burning at me. I keep my eyes closed for as long as I can, but eventually I realise I need to see whether I have the chance to stop, to find air. Acidic agony creeps over my eyeballs. I can only just barely make out enough to know that the narrow, water-worn tunnel I’m sliding down doesn’t have an air pocket to rescue me.

There’s no retreat from this nightmare, though. No going back. I clench my arms firmly by my sides, legs together. Make my body an arrow and let the vile, scorching torrent take me.

I slide for too long. I’m losing focus, in real danger of unconsciousness. This was a mistake. I am helpless. I begin to panic that the wounds in my arm have opened, that I’ve lost the Vitaeria embedded there. It feels like it. More and more.

I am dying.

Then, air.

I flail and slip and scrabble blindly to stop as I retch and hack, poisonous fluid ejecting from my lungs. My vision is blurred, filmy and vague, but I can make out light. I throw myself upward toward it. There’s a ledge. My fingernails rake along its smooth surface as the water continues to drag me too fast. Enough of the acidic slime coating my hands rubs away and I manage to find purchase on something, a narrow pipe I think, just enough to haul myself out, rolling away from the stream, weeping and choking in alternate fits.

I scrub furiously at my eyes, the act painful but no more so than leaving them alone. I brush against something wet and soft and warm, and recoil but can’t see what it is yet. It doesn’t react to my touch, though. My breathing becomes marginally easier. My head clearer. There’s still pain but it’s background now, not nearly as bad as the still-fading panic.

My vision gradually returns. I clutch at my arm, feel the lumps of the Vitaeria still there. My skin, beneath the burning, remains intact. Unblemished.

Finally, after what feels like minutes of blinking away the remaining sludge from my eyes, I can see again. I’m kneeling on the edge of a narrow canal cut into the stone floor.

I raise my eyes and stand and turn slowly, breath suddenly short again.

I am in a room large enough that I cannot see its end in any direction except the opening-dotted wall from which the water emerges. Mine is not the only canal; stream after stream flows in its own half-cylinder slit, every second one tinted a sickly green. The alternate ones are lit a soft white, and have only trickles of water dribbling along them. Together they provide the dimmest of light, barely enough to touch the low-hanging roof that sits uncomfortably close, not a half foot above my head.

And just enough to silhouette the supine, twitching bodies.

There are hundreds of them. More. Positioned in between the canals on slightly raised slabs, a little like in the Nomarch except these have no light around their edges. Men and women alike, convulsing and shuddering in constant motion. Only in increments, though. A kind of shivering judder, not enough to shift them to one side or the other. They form a dark sea of silent, twisting, trembling flesh.

Stone pipes rise from the canals. Curve up and over the bodies.

Into gaping wounds in their stomachs, pinning them in place.

I just stand there, confused and disgusted and agitated all at once. Wondering if this is some trick of the poison that’s been flowing through me, even as I know it can’t be. I step hesitantly closer. They are clothed like in the Nomarch, but the linen here is tattered, frayed and crumbling around the edges. They’re all wearing collars, too, I can see now. An entire string of small, thin stone discs arrayed against their throats.

In the dim light, each circle shows the faint etching of a scarab beetle.

I gaze at the nearest one, dazed, then touch the pipe I used to drag myself out of the canal. It quivers beneath my fingers. Toxic water rushing through it. I crouch to see another pipe emerging from the base of the table, beneath the shuddering body on it.

A small, steady stream of clear liquid leaks from it into the white-lit canal.

Before I can properly comprehend it, there’s an oblique movement in the far distance, barely visible but above the height of the tables; I drop to my knees, concealing myself behind the nearest twitching corpse. I don’t think I’ll have been noticed. Not with the constant motion around us.

My skin crawls as I peer over my unsettling cover. The silhouetted woman I spotted wanders the rows of tables, examining each shivering corpse as she passes, her attention upon her work. Her black, ragged clothing, as well as her perfectly repetitive motions and unswerving focus, marks her an Overseer—albeit one far more shabbily dressed than any I have seen. No indication she has spotted my presence or anything unusual. I can’t imagine she would have been instructed to look. Wherever this place is, it surely gets few intruders.

The Overseer is closer now, walking off to my left; I move gradually to my right, keeping plenty of bodies between us, and then forward, positioning myself behind her. She never turns as I creep closer.

Twenty feet. I cannot see a way out of here but there must be one, must be some path down through which these iunctii were brought. Ten feet. Two.

I grab her arm. “Remain still and do not make any unusual reports. If you are in communication with any other iunctii, continue that communication as if nothing has happened here and you are successfully going about your task.” It comes out hoarse, barely a whisper, the fire of the toxins in my lungs unabated.

The Overseer stands there, motionless.

I relinquish my grip, wincing as the water still on my hand leaves a red, suppurating print on her skin. “Now answer my questions, and answer wholly and truthfully. What is this place?” My voice shakes.

“A purification room.”

“What does that mean?” Bile in my throat. I know the answer. I still have to hear it.

“Contaminated water is drawn in. It is treated, then redirected to the city’s wells.”

Oh, vek, no. “Treated?”

“Internally. It is the only known way to remove the worst of the toxins.”

I say nothing, just looking at the nearest corpse quivering on its table. I’ve been drinking from those wells for the past few months.

Then I bend double and retch the meagre contents of my stomach onto the grimy floor.

The bile trickles away into the closest of the green canals. The floors are all mildly sloped toward them, I realise. Ensuring the least chance of dirtying the “clean” water, presumably.

I spit and wipe my mouth. “How many more iunctii like you are there down here?”

“I am the only one assigned to this room.”

“No other Overseers? No guards?”

“None.”

I glance around. “Where’s the way out?” I’m not intending to use it, but it would be good information to have.

“The entrance is sealed.”

“Sealed?” My heart lurches with a fresh wave of unease. “When?”

“Six hundred and thirty-three years ago.”

I don’t say anything for a few seconds. Close my eyes against the horror of it.

“Rotting gods,” I whisper.

I ask more, but get few answers as helpful as what has already come. She is certain that the waste canals from here lead outside and rejoin the river north of Duat; though she cannot speak to the specifics, she assures me that in the “early years,” iunctii who could no longer perform their tasks were disposed of that way.

No longer perform their tasks. I shiver at the cold delivery. The pipes are wide enough to accommodate a body, even if the information gives me no indication of whether the way is entirely submersed, or there is a long drop onto rocks at the end, or anything else useful. But it’s something.

I do all I can to focus on the questions and block out the shuddering mass around me. There are no moans of pain, no sounds at all except the gurgling of water. Somehow, that makes it worse.

Eventually, I finish. Loathe to proceed, but even more loathe to stay. This place is a dark, repellent fever dream.

I hesitate one more time. “Are they in pain?”

“I do not know.”

I just nod, though it’s not as if she can see my reaction. I don’t know what else I expected.

“When I finish speaking, you will resume your duties. You will not report my presence or these questions. You will forget that I was ever here, and that you were interrupted in any way.”

She stands there for a few moments and then, content I’m done, moves again. She doesn’t even glance back in my direction.

I watch her, then push my attention back to the convulsing dance of flesh around me. No chance they’re not in pain. I could put them out of their misery. Gods, I could use a few of those collars myself, even if the chains stringing them together would be almost certain to disintegrate.

But I would likely raise an alarm. Not to mention that for all I know, interfering could cut off the entire city’s water supply.

I walk slowly along one of the green canals, eyes still sharp for any unusual movement ahead despite what the Overseer said about her working alone down here. Sure enough, though, there’s nothing.

It’s almost ten minutes before I see the far wall. See the dark holes into which the toxic water vanishes. The white-lit canals don’t travel that far, instead trickling into small pools which seem to have some sort of drainage in their base.

I don’t look too closely. At some point, horror overcomes even morbid curiosity.

It’s harder, this time, stepping into the burning water. Knowing what it is like. Knowing what’s coming.

But I have no choice, so I do.

The pain climbs. Wraps its fingers around me, squeezing muscles, shortening breath.

And I slide into its violence once more.